Not a bug Images in Mac Mail app are broken for XF 2.1 replies

NealC

NealC

Well-known member
Affected version
2.1
I got an email notification from this forum where a user replied with an image in this thread. The image is broken in Mac Mail app but I can see it using my webmail. Not sure why Mac Mail is blocking the images from forum replies.
 
Your mail client is likely blocking remote content by default. On macOS Mail you should see a banner stating as such at the top.

If that isn't the problem, and certain images are still not showing, then the likelihood is that these images are actually attachments.

If you try to access that attachment as a guest (or in a browser where you're logged out), that will give you an idea as to what is going on. Your browser needs to be logged in to be able to view attachments.

Your mail client isn't logged into the forum, so it can't display the image. On the other hand, your webmail is likely in the same browser where you are logged in so the images will display correctly there.
 
I'm a software developer, well aware of these things :) I get images in other emails, I'm logged in here, not sure what it could be. I also checked the HTML source. Who knows, not going to put too much time into it but not sure why the thread from this site didn't show the picture in the email and it showed as a broken image. No banner at the top, I have the option to download images set.
 
True, wonder though if there is a way to better get images to render in a notification from a registered member's post? Obviously I am watching the "secured" thread, how can I get the image for my content?
 
It sounds like images are in an area requiring permissions such as being logged in. I think the fix to this is having images, such as message content, stored so as not to require login so when a user receives the message they are subscribed to, the image will render in the email. Again, if the user does not have permissions for the notification or message, the content will not be available as they won't receive the message.
 
After some thought on this I do believe this needs to be handled better. XF offers an option to show the full message in replies. Any content in that message should be available to the recipient of that message otherwise they wouldn't receive it. Therefore the text and image(s) are both the same relevance, if they can read the text they should be able to view the images. Otherwise admins will disable the feature as it's not performing as expected only providing partial content thus driving the user to read the message on the forum. Broken images are a problem that need to be resolved IMHO.
 
NealC said:
After some thought on this I do believe this needs to be handled better. XF offers an option to show the full message in replies. Any content in that message should be available to the recipient of that message otherwise they wouldn't receive it. Therefore the text and image(s) are both the same relevance, if they can read the text they should be able to view the images. Otherwise admins will disable the feature as it's not performing as expected only providing partial content thus driving the user to read the message on the forum. Broken images are a problem that need to be resolved IMHO.
Click to expand...
You can resolve it, you can set attachments to be viewable as guest:
Chris D said:
If you try to access that attachment as a guest (or in a browser where you're logged out), that will give you an idea as to what is going on. Your browser needs to be logged in to be able to view attachments.
Click to expand...

It probably isn't feasible to somehow make the XF mailing system attach any attachments to the mail itself, that can lead to a whole slew of problems (mail servers blocking the email for potentially malicious attachments - exe files, zip files, or attachment max size, etc).
 
Actually, my bad. On reflection, I’m not sure why I assumed it was conversations. It does appear to be related to threads.
 
Couldn't the image have some sort of "secret" key in the URL for emails to prevent this from happening? If not it'd probably be best to strip the embedded attachment out of the email since you're typically not going to be able to view it if it's not publicly visible regardless of whether you're logged in and viewing your email from the same browser since most webmail clients will proxy the image. Or maybe even just embed the thumbnail since they're always publicly available in the data directory.
 
I was thinking the same thing. Use a custom URL for the email that allows the content to be viewed as again, the recipient of the email has permission to the content.
 
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